Asia recorded its first case of MPOX on Friday, in Pakistan, the day after the discovery in Sweden of a patient carrying a more virulent strain of the virus, a first outside Africa where an epidemic is raging that has prompted the WHO to trigger a global health alert.
The resurgence of mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is also affecting Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, prompted the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency of international concern on Wednesday, the highest alarm.
The WHO plans to publish the first recommendations of its emergency committee soon and has already asked, along with health NGOs, vaccine manufacturers to significantly increase their production.
"We need manufacturers to really ramp up production so that we have access to many, many more vaccines," WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said in Geneva.
On Thursday, Sweden announced that it had recorded a case of subtype clade 1b, the same new strain that has appeared in the DRC since September 2023.
The strain of the mpox virus that caused the case in Pakistan was not immediately known on Friday, the Pakistani health ministry said.
The infected person, a 34-year-old man, "is from a Gulf country," the ministry said. He is being treated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and samples have been sent to Islamabad for genetic sequencing of the strain.
– Europe “must prepare itself” –
After the case was discovered in Sweden, the WHO warned that further imported cases of the new strain in Europe were likely "in the coming days".
"The confirmation of MPOX subtype clade 1 in Sweden clearly reflects the interconnectedness of our world (…) It is likely that further imported cases of clade 1 will be recorded in the European region in the coming days and weeks," the organisation warned.
For its part, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) called on Friday on countries in the European Union and the European Economic Area to "prepare" for an increase in the number of cases, to "enable rapid detection and response to any new cases".
"Due to the close links between Europe and Africa, we need to prepare for a greater number of imported cases of clade 1," said Pamela Rendi-Wagner, Director of ECDC.
France, for its part, placed its health system on "maximum alert" on Friday.
China announced on Friday that it would strengthen its controls on people and goods entering its territory for a period of six months.
– Essential vaccination –
The epidemic is particularly affecting the DRC, a country of about 100 million people. Its health minister, Samuel-Roger Kamba, said in a video this week that the country had recorded nearly 16,000 "potential" cases and 548 deaths this year.
He announced the establishment of a "national strategic vaccination plan" as well as other measures to combat the epidemic.
Formerly called monkeypox – a name abandoned in favor of the more neutral mpox – the virus was discovered in 1958 in Denmark, in monkeys raised for research. Then in 1970 for the first time in humans in what is now the DRC.
MPOX is a viral disease that spreads from animals to humans but is also transmitted through close physical contact with a person infected with the virus.
The disease causes fever, muscle pain and skin lesions such as pustules.
The United States will donate 50,000 doses of the MPOX vaccine to the DRC, as vaccination "will be an essential part of the response to the epidemic."
For its part, the Danish pharmaceutical laboratory Bavarian Nordic, manufacturer of a vaccine, said on Thursday that it was ready to produce up to 10 million doses by 2025. It currently has some 500,000 doses in stock.
There are two subtypes of the virus: clade 1, which is more virulent and deadly and is endemic to the Congo Basin in Central Africa, and clade 2, which is endemic to West Africa.
Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa with more than 218 million inhabitants, announced on Friday that it had recorded 39 cases of mpox and no deaths since the beginning of the year. According to an expert from the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), these would be cases of type clade 2 "which has a fairly low mortality rate" estimated at 0.1%.
A global outbreak that began in 2022, involving clade 2b, has caused some 140 deaths out of about 90,000 cases, primarily affecting gay and bisexual men.
The more dangerous clade 1b, currently in circulation, is more transmissible, particularly through non-sexual contact, threatening children, the main victims of the current epidemic in Africa.
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